The impending release of Ruby on Rails version 3 both refines and expands the capabilities of the popular Web application framework. Offering cleaner controllers and savvier SQL queries, you can expect to write less code than before. Better yet, you can include most of the components of Rails 3 in any Ruby application. Here's a look at what's changed for the better.

With the increasing interest in Ruby on Rails from companies in the enterprise world, some observers have posed questions about its suitability when it comes to the demanding requirements in this arena. One issue that some have called attention to is that ActiveRecord, Rails' Object-Relational Mapper (ORM), doesn't use prepared statements—or at least it didn't until now. With the latest release of DB2® on Rails, parameterized queries are automatically available and bring with them important performance and security benefits to Rails applications.

Sinatra is a library that allows you to build almost any kind of web-based application in a very simple manner. When you code in Sinatra you’re bound only by HTTP and your Ruby knowledge. You'll obviously want to start building tiny web-applications and small services, and that's just what we'll do in this article. By the end of this article by Satish Talim, you'll be able to understand:* what Sinatra is* how to install Sinatra and its dependencies* how to build a tiny web-application* how to deploy the tiny web-app to Heroku

Ruby is a feature-rich, free, simple, extensible, portable, and object-oriented scripting language. As a powerful text processing language, it has immense capability. With powerful built-in libraries and a set of external libraries, Ruby is a viable option for a solution to any mundane text processing task that you might encounter.

Web applications often analyze data in the database by generating reports. Charts provide a visual representation of the reports, can be used for understanding trends and generally facilitate better synthesis of data. Ruby On Rails is one of the technologies that can be used to create these web applications with reports and charts. In this article, we will discuss how to create charts in Ruby on Rails.

In addition to building Web and console applications with Ruby, you can write complex GUI desktop applications that run unmodified on multiple platforms. Thanks to JRuby, a robust alternative to the traditional C implementation of Ruby, Ruby GUI toolkits can use UI tools available to the Java™ platform. This article introduces Monkeybars, a library that uses JRuby and Swing for building applications, and takes you through an example application. Ruby is currently best known as a programming language for building Web applications, primarily with the Ruby on Rails framework. However, the language is more than capable for developing graphical desktop applications as well. In this article, you'll learn more about using Ruby for the desktop, and you'll work through a detailed example that uses Monkeybars — an open source library based on Swing and JRuby — to create a GUI desktop application.

Ruby on Rails has raised the bar in terms of rapid development of data-driven Web sites. The JRuby project is making Ruby faster and more scalable than ever. One of the great advantages to running Rails on the Java Virtual Machine is that you can leverage other Java libraries, like the Apache Derby embedded database. The combination of Derby, JRuby, and Rails allows for rapid prototyping of dynamic Web applications. Learn how to use these technologies together to help you prototype your next great idea.